There is a comic strip called "Unshelved", available at
http://www.overduemedia.com, about libraries and books. Each
Sunday, the strip is about a particular book, many of SF interest.
The following are this year's SF-related ones (so far):

A friend was telling me that everybody believes in the same god.
He may be called Jehovah, Allah, or as my friend calls Him
Wahkontah. He says that there are different names but one god.
This got me thinking. Suppose it was not true. Suppose no two
people believed in the same god. How would you know? [-mrl]

It is somewhat surprising to me that perhaps my greatest claim to
fame after I die will probably be an off-hand comment I made as
part of a speech I gave at a science fiction convention. When I
made the comment it certainly did not seem to me to be anything
more than a moment's whimsy. I guess you never can tell.

I was sharing with Evelyn the Fan Guest of Honor position at
Covert Contraption. This was a very big compliment. I had
gotten the honor mostly for my Internet presence I presume. I
made a speech and in that speech I noted, "Live TV died in the
late 1950s, electronic bulletin boards came along in the mid-
1980s, meaning there was about a 25-year gap when it was
difficult to put your foot in your mouth and have people all
across the country know about it." It was okay as a comment. I
have coined them better and I have coined them worse. Little did
I know that Fate had chosen that moment and that comment. Among
all the humorous (or attempted-humorous) comments I make and
among all the things that I write, that one comment may well be
my greatest claim to fame. I think that easily the majority of
people who have come in contact with my name will have done so
through reading that one wry observation.

After the convention I was looking for something to fill out
these editorial pages and I included the text of my Guest of
Honor speech. I am always looking for what to say in my
editorials, and it was just to keep the wolf away from the door
for one more week. I believe what happened after that is that
some reader, probably Bill Higgins, took the quote and used it
for a signature file. Bill finds a variety of great comments to
put into his email signature and this too was an honor. I have
no idea where the quote went after that, but I suspect he is my
leak. The Internet leaves little audit trail. But a few years
later I started finding a quote from me show up in compilations
of famous quotes. Other people seem to pick it up and it
traveled like a virus or a meme.

If I just put the quote into Google it finds 2360 appearances on
the Internet of just this one quote. After that if I look for
this with my name attached, it finds a disappointing but still
respectable 190 occurrences. This is partially true because many
people seem to use the quote without my name. But a sizable
fraction attribute the quote to one Michael Meissner. This
disturbed me. Who is this Michael Meissner, and why is he
getting credit for my quote? I certainly know that it was me who
said it. He is unlikely to have made the same observation, word-
for-word. How are people getting the idea that it was he who
said it? Actually, looking in Google some 114 sites list the
quote and attribute it to Michael Meissner. Well, I found one
such site that listed my quotation and attributed it to Meissner.
Just on a lark I looked to see if that site had any quotes
attributed to me. Yes, it did. It quoted me as saying "I'd wipe
the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the
industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake." It said that
that was a quote from me. Curiouser and curiouser. To the best
of my knowledge I never said any such thing. This truth is that
I would not wipe the machines off of the face of the earth even
if I had that power. Or if I did I would make an exception for
my pocket computer that I dote upon. It does not sound like
anything I ever would say either in style or in sentiment. I
like machines. In fact, some of my best friends are machines.

Puzzled I put this new quote in Google to see if that could shed
any light. The first few sites that listed the quote attributed
it to one of the country's most gifted writers and humorists,
namely Mark Leeper. Other sites attribute it as appearing in
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, a novel I did know to have been written
either by D. H. Lawrence or by me, and while my memory is not as
good as it once was, I have strong suspicions it was by Lawrence.

I ran to get the book to check. There it was in Chapter 15.
This was the ultimate indignity. Not only are they taking my
quote away from me and attributing it to Michael Meissner, they
also implied I was taking credit for a most disagreeable passage
from LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER. Also I know something of the
scandal that LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER has caused, and I live in
fear that Lawrence has gotten the royalties and I am going to get
the blame. I want it clearly understood that I did not write
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER. I still have no comment as to whether I
authored MUPPET L-ST, HIGH SCHOOL DRUM MAJORETTE SL-TS, or BENJI
IN B-NDAGE, but I definitely deny writing LADY CHATTERLEY'S
LOVER. (Please excuse the hyphens in those titles, but I have to
get this e-mail publication to get past nanny filters that might
be protecting some users' mailboxes. If I had the power I think
I'd wipe nanny filters off the face of the earth again, and end
the over-protective epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.)

I might note that http://gordonmarantz.com/coquote.html lists
consecutively the D H Lawrence quote, my quote, and a quote
"Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be
spelled ABUSENET?" from Michael Meissner. Obviously somebody
found these quotes and pulled them into a database linked to the
authors' names. They had a table of quotes and a table of
authors. As is almost inevitable, such tables get out of synch
and I suffer from the results. This is at very least a gray
mistake.

Mark responds, "Oddly enough, without fully appreciating the
meaning of the word, I used it correctly except that I think of
myself as a liberal and it is a conservative term. I guess it is
open to interpretation if such a person would be considered a
moonbat. See http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=moonbat for
more info." [-mrl]

Jerry responds, "I couldn't find moonbat on Merriam-Webster, but
I could find mooncalf. Oddly enough, he echoed, I first came
across 'mooncalf' in an essay by P. J. O'Rourke. As a liberal
myself, is it odd to read him?" [-gwr]

I started this series of reviews back in November of 2005 with a
review of Frank Herbert's all-time SF classic, Dune. I finish
this series of reviews with CHAPTERHOUSE: DUNE, and I still feel
the way I did twenty-five years ago or so when I first read the
book. It's finally getting better again, and there has to be
more.

And then Frank Herbert died, leaving us with a nasty cliffhanger
on three fronts.

Let me start at the beginning of this book. The original planet
Dune, Arrakis, now Rakis, was obliterated by the Honored Matres,
who were furious at Miles Teg, the Bene Gesserit, and anyone who
got in their way. Miles was killed during the destruction of the
planet, but they were able to take away one last sandworm in an
effort not only to recreate Dune elsewhere, but to end the
apparent domination of Leto II, whose essence lives on in the
giant sandworms and who the Bene Gesserit believe is still
influencing life in the Empire.

The Honored Matres are burning planets left and right in an
effort to find Chapterhouse, the Bene Gesserit headquarters.
Miles Teg is revived as a ghola, using the recently revealed true
secret of the Tleilaxu axlotl tanks. The Bene Gesserit have also
captured an Honored Matre named Murbella, whom they hope to turn
into a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. Murbella, Duncan Idaho,
and Scytale, the last living Tleilaxu Master, are imprisoned in a
no-ship on the surface of Chapterhouse (what kind of name is
*that* for a planet anyway?--a question that even Darwi Odrade,
Mother Superior of the Bene Gesserit order, asks herself during
the course of the novel). They are reluctant prisoners,
certainly reluctant to perform the biddings of Odrade *because*
they are captives. Murbella and Idaho become reluctant lovers,
and Scytale carries around in him a secret nullentropy tube which
contains genetic material not only for Face Dancers and other
Tleilaxu, but also for our original cast of characters back in
Dune: Paul, Jessica, Gurney, and others.

The story is that of the survival and transformation of the Bene
Gesserit order. The order is being wiped out one planet at a
time, and they must fight back. Mother Superior Odrade has a
plan that will change the face of the universe as well as the
Bene Gesserit forever. In the meantime, Miles Teg must have his
memories awakened if he is going to lead his armies against the
Honored Matres, and that presents its own problems. Duncan Idaho
is assigned the task, but his memories of Teg awakening him are
too painful, so another approach must be taken. And just who
*are* Marty and Daniel anyway, other than the new type of Face
Dancer that the Tleilaxu created and lost control of?

And finally, just who are the Honored Matres running from as they
return from the Scattering?

There is a lot going on here. It's a very complex novel, I think
easily the most complex novel of the six. Additionally, the
writing style over the six novels changed dramatically from the
original to CHAPTERHOUSE: DUNE; it is easily the most literary
novel of the group. It also sometimes wanders far afield, as we
get more and more of Herbert's philosophical, political, and
religious viewpoints. At least in this novel, unlike GOD EMPEROR
OF DUNE where we get beat over the head with all that stuff but
nothing happens, there *is* a story here, and a pretty good one.
Just not a complete one.

And so this series of reviews ends. What Anderson and Herbert
have in store for us remains to be seen, although the first two
chapters are up on http://www.dunenovels.com for those who are
interested in looking ahead. I look forward to it with a bit of
anticipation and trepidation. I hope they can do it justice.
[-jak]

I read Spanish (somewhat), but not French (except minimally). So
if the most readily available English translation of Jules
Verne's JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (the 1872 one that
turns "Lidenbrook" into "Hardwigg") is horrendous and completely
unfaithful to the original, would I be better off reading a
Spanish translation? In other words, how important is a faithful
translation?

But luckily, my library had a decent English translation of
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (translated by Robert Baldick,
ISBN 0-7838-0319-2), so I read that instead. Every once in a
while I would compare the Baldick version, the 1872 version, and
the Spanish version (uncredited, published by Editorial Universo,
Lima, Peru), which each time re-enforced my feeling that Baldick
is fairly accurate, and the 1872 is completely off.

For example, here are several versions of the section describing
Lidenbrook's stammer:

Baldick: "Unfortunately for him, my uncle had difficulty in
speaking fluently, not so much at home as in public, and this is
a regrettable defect in an orator. Indeed, in his lectures at
the Johannaeum the professor would often stop short, struggling
with a recalcitrant word which refused to slip between his lips,
one of those words which resist, swell up, and finally come out n
the rather unscientific form of a swear-word. This was what
always sent him into a rage. / Now in mineralogy there are a
great many barbarous terms, half Greek and half Latin, which are
difficult to pronounce and which would take the skin off any
poet's lips. I don't want to say a word against that science--
far from it--but when ones finds oneself in the presence of
rhomohedral crystals, retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites,
fangasites, molybdenites, tungstates of manganese, and titanite
of zirconium, the nimblest tongue may be forgiven for slipping."

Ward, Lock, & Co. 1877: "To his misfortune, my uncle was not
gifted with a sufficiently rapid utterance; not, to be sure, when
he was talking at home, but certainly in his public delivery;
this is a want much to be deplored in a speaker. The fact is,
that during the course of his lectures at the Johannĉum, the
Professor often came to a complete standstill; he fought with
wilful words that refused to pass his struggling lips, such words
as resist and distend the cheeks, and at last break out into the
unasked-for shape of a round and most unscientific oath: then his
fury would gradually abate. / Now in mineralogy there are many
half-Greek and half-Latin terms, very hard to articulate, and
which would be most trying to a poet's measures. I don't wish to
say a word against so respectable a science, far be that from me.
True, in the august presence of rhombohedral crystals,
retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites, Fassaites, molybdenites,
tungstates of manganese, and titanite of zirconium, why, the most
facile of tongues may make a slip now and then."

1872: "There was a reason, and it may be regarded as a good one,
why my uncle objected to display his learning more than was
absolutely necessary: he stammered; and when intent upon
explaining the phenomena of the heavens, was apt to find himself
at fault, and allude in such a vague way to sun, moon, and stars
that few were able to comprehend his meaning. To tell the honest
truth, when the right word would not come, it was generally
replaced by a very powerful adjective. / In connection with the
sciences there are many almost unpronounceable names- names very
much resembling those of Welsh villages; and my uncle being very
fond of using them, his habit of stammering was not thereby
improved. In fact, there were periods in his discourse when he
would finally give up and swallow his discomfiture--in a glass of
water."

It is, by the way, not true that in Iceland in June and July the
sun does not rise or set (Chapter 13 [Chapter 10 in the 1872
translation]). It sets about 1AM and rises about 4AM. I suspect
what is meant is that it never gets dark. And leprosy is not
hereditary. (These are both incorrect in the original Verne, so
one cannot blame the translators.) [-ecl]

[Apropos of all this, Reuters reports: "Brendan Fraser has boarded
"Journey to the Center of the Earth," a contemporary, 3-D update
of the Jules Verne classic. The story revolves around a scientist
who is stuck with his nephew as they embark on a trip to Iceland
to check on a volcanic sensor. During a storm, they get trapped
in a cave and the only way out is through the center of Earth."
This sounds even less faithful than the 1972 translation. -ecl]

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
If it's a good idea . . . go ahead and do it.
It is much easier to apologize than it is to
get permission."
-- Grace Murray Hopper